Weekly Design Roundup – Enzo Cucchi, space-age lamps on France's TGV, and trompe l'oeuil tablecloths
🌀🌀🌀 Modernist trains in France following the mushroom lamp craze
Welcome back to my ⋆ .𖥔˚Weekly Design Roundup˚𖥔. ⋆
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A late Friday night post in honour of all of you who are similarly home-bodies by default. While I (of course) love a Friday night reservation at London’s latest small-plates, natty-wine, must-try spot as much as the next girl, nothing truly thrills me more than the possibility of a weekend evening with absolutely no obligations, expectations or commitments.
Example 1: tonight. After front-loading my social calendar into the first half of this week (myself and a friend quite literally closed down a Vietnamese restaurant on a Monday night), I found myself luxuriating this evening in the possibility of sitting and sifting through the various design bits I had collected over the past week or so.
And sift I had to. It’s interesting how things stick out to you in different ways week to week - this week I was inundated by small design connections, learnings, or rabbit holes that crossed over and connected in curious ways. A favourite Instagram design follow writing in Home and Garden and the subsequent article being shared by a Byzantinist scholar I know. Embroidered tablecloths that were all the rage online a few years ago showing up again on a website I was perusing thanks to a favourite author’s wife. Pinterest bathroom renovation research turning up a perfect Calder-in-bathroom photo the same day as
’s latest newsletter on Calder.
All of this to say it has felt like a week of serendipitous spirals and overlaps. And those are some of the most inspiring weeks for me personally, where I can feel my design muscles flexing in new ways and making connections where there weren’t any before. Enjoy some of those connections below!
France’s modernist-inspired trains
Starting with something sleek and fast and fun - literally! France has recently unveiled their newly designed TGV (high-speed) trains, designed in collaboration with sesign studios Nendo and Arep.
I was first made aware of the newly-designed trains thanks to the reel below - which immediately led down the design rabbit hole.
The Japanese studio Nendo lead the “nose to seat” redesign of the high-speed train “using the sinuous aerodynamic shape as a guiding principle.” As the design team explains:
While I do see the way the design harkens to the natural environment and geological elements, I am perhaps more interested in the ways that the fluid, bold interiors seemingly draw inspiration from mid-century, space-age design.
Taking simply the lamps as a case study, their simplified form, glass or porcelain looking material, and exaggerated modern look all call to 60s modernist lamp design, particularly those of Italian designer Harvey Guzzini.
This piece does a brilliant job outlining Guzzini’s history and legacy but, perhaps more practically, if you yourself would like a mid-century lamp in your own home they are shockingly easy to find on Etsy, Ebay or other vintage resale websites. As captured below, some combination of the keywords “guzzini”, “mushroom lamp”, “space age”, “60s”, and “mid century” should do the trick.
Enzo Cucchi
Next up is the new-to-me artist Enzo Cucchi. I was introduced the Italian painter via Alpha60’s latest AUTUMN 2025 MOOD - Alpha60 is an independent Australian fashion label that curates and shares mood-boards to accompany their latest seasonal collections.
Their first Autumn 2025 Mood was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, as discussed in one of my previous newsletters and their most recent draws on the works of the neo-expressionist painter Cucchi.
Cucchi, born in 1949 in the province of Ancona, was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, which was the Italian version of Neo-expressionism. The term transavanguardia comes from the works presented at the 1980 Venice Biennale and literally means ‘beyond the avant-garde’.
Cucchi and the other transavanguardia artists were interested in “reviving painting and reintroducing emotion – especially joy – back into drawing, painting and sculpture”. They rejected the rise of conceptual art, rather turning to figurative art, mythic imagery, and symbolism in their works.
Cucchi is likely most well-known for his large-scale oil paintings which "are characterized by their simple, almost primitively depicted images rendered in vivid, dramatic colors, and was once described in the New York Times as an ‘artist who waves his paintbrush like a magician’s wand.’”
However, Cucchi has also worked in a wide variety of other media including paper, photography, sculpture, design, and architecture. He collaborated with Mario Botta on the chapel built on Monte Tamaro near Lugano, Switzerland, where Cucchi worked on designing the interiors. He has made outdoor sculptures for the Brueglinger Park in Basel in 1984, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen. He has designed costumes and sets for productions and operas around Italy including Puccini‘s Tosca at the Teatro dell‘Opera in Rome.
What I love most about Cucchi work is the symbolic, dream-like quality that pervades all his work, regardless of medium, scale or material. I feel like you could peel back layers of references, symbolism, and meaning in each of his pieces if only you had the time.
A particular favourite discovered while trawling through Artnet’s collection of his works is a painting titled ‘Homage to Miró’, referencing the surrelist painter, sculptor and ceramist Joan Miró.
What homage do we imagine Cucchi creating here? It the the pointed shape a tree? Arrow head? Is it sculptural? Metaphorical? And what are the small white square circling around the tip? I’ll let you decide.
Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and photography
Next is the incredible interdisciplinary book Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and photography. Annie Ernaux is, of course, the fame French author who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory". Her literary work is large autobiographical and explores themes relating to social inequality, sociological expectations, intimate relationships, and time and memory.
Like any good literary hot girl and self-declared Francophile, I am of course an enormous Annie Ernaux fan, personal favourites being The Years and A Woman’s Story.
I had never, however, heard of her writing being used alongside art - in this case photography - in art exhibitions. The book I came across titled Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and photography was a lucky coincidence as I was scrolling through the astonishing MACK books website. MACK is an independent publisher of award-winning books on contemporary art, critical theory, film and architecture and their website (which I have only recently discovered) is a treasure-trove of design related publications.
But back to the book. Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and photography is the publication associated with an exhibition held at MEP Paris (Musée Européenne de la Photographie) last year.
A description of the exhibition and book is as follows:
Taking Ernaux’s unique artistic endeavour to ‘describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered’, this project by writer and curator Lou Stoppard uncovers the profound ways the written and visual image can inform and inflect on one another. In doing so, it proposes a new way of thinking about literature and photography, and the ways in which shared themes – such as class, travel, social stereotypes, and individual identity within the modern urban environment – might be explored between these two forms.
The book pairs photographs from the exhibition with excerpts of Ernaux's writing in a carefully curated catalogue exploring the intersection of artistic expression and media.
All this to say I am gutted I didn’t know this was happening in Paris last year and am desperate to get by hands on the book as solace.
Sarah Espeute’s and La Jambu’s embroidered tablecloths
A quick final piece of design inspiration - Sarah Espeute and La Jambu’s embroidered tablecloths.
A couple years ago around 2021-2022, photos of these embroidered tablecloths designed by Sarah Espeute raced through the post-Covid internet like wildfire. I of course fell in love with the fabrics not only for their whimsical, delicate designs, but also because they reminded me of trompe l’oeuil Roman “unswept floor” mosaics.
For context, “unswept floor” mosaics are a common type of mosaic found most often in the dining rooms of elite Roman homes. The name come from asarotos oikos, or “unswept room” in Greek and the trend was an unique way of signalling wealth and status in the ancient world.
By decorating your dining room with deliberately expensive refuse – fresh seafood from the coast, murex snail shells which produced purple dye only worn by the elite, mulberries from Asia, ginger from India, figs from the Middle East – guests could observe both your social status and artistic humour.
Fast forward to this week where an Instagram story about Indian design from a favourite author’s artist wife led to La Jambu, an online boutique “founded by Riya Patel, […] born with a purpose of bringing together British & Indian culture through modern design to create a curated edit of exclusive homeware and lifestyle products.”
La Jambu’s homeware and lifestyle offerings are the stuff of dreams. All carefully designed by Patel and hand-made in India, the pieces are deliberately playful and include their own take on a multitude of hand-embroidered items, including tablecloths.
While Sarah’s designs were seemingly the original iteration of the embroidered à table tablecloths, I appreciate La Jambu’s particularly British take on the trend - their tablecloth is titled The 6 English Fry Up and features embroidered fry-up staples like tomatoes, baked beans, and black pudding.
You can purchase Sarah’s tablecloths and other items on her website, Oeuvre Sensibles, La Jambu’s on their site – or you can find a myriad of more affordable options on Etsy by search “hand embroidered tablecloth with plates”.
That’s it for this week! ꩜꩜꩜Avery